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Deleting all the records from a table

Often, you'll need to empty a table of all of its records so you can reload the data. You can do this with a delete statement with just the table as an argument. For example, in the video, Jason deleted the table extra_employees by executing as follows:

delete_stmt = delete(extra_employees)
result_proxy = connection.execute(delete_stmt)

Do be careful, though, as deleting cannot be undone!

This is a part of the course

“Introduction to Databases in Python”

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Exercise instructions

  • Import delete and select from sqlalchemy.
  • Build a delete statement to remove all the data from the census table. Save it as delete_stmt.
  • Execute delete_stmt via the connection and save the results.
  • Submit the answer to select all remaining rows from the census table and print the result to confirm that the table is now empty!

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Import delete, select
from sqlalchemy import ____, ____

# Build a statement to empty the census table: stmt
delete_stmt = ____

# Execute the statement: results
results = ____

# Print affected rowcount
print(results.rowcount)

# Build a statement to select all records from the census table : select_stmt
select_stmt = select([census])

# Print the results of executing the statement to verify there are no rows
print(connection.execute(select_stmt).fetchall())
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